Simon Cowell is not a stranger to traveling the world, even his television shows travel the world. He has reality-based talent television shows being produced in 58 countries. With all that global reach he must be able to speak multiple languages to finalize the deals. What languages does Simon Cowell speak?
It’s thought that Simon Cowell only speaks English. He was born and raised in England only ever needed the one language. As for the business dealings, he may have people who are fluent in any language he needs.
To be fair, Simon did state that he was trying to learn Spanish so that he could find the talent to create a Latin version of his famous boy band One Direction.
Monolingual Stats
There are many studies showing a range of how many people are monolingual or can only speak one language, in the world. Some have the number as low as 25%, though many agree that it is somewhere around 40%.
Of the 75% of Americans who only speak in their native tongue, 80% of them only speak English. American English, especially in written terms, is different than British English, with the most obvious differences being the difference in using s vs. z in some words, such as civilization, and dropping the u in words such as behavior and neighbor.
Even within the English language, there are different dialects between countries, and even within the same country as Cowell found out when someone from Newcastle was auditioning for Britan’s Got Talent.
Many Americans, in addition to other prominent English countries such as the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand, feel there’s no need to learn another language, as most of the various aspects of the business world all speak English.
Bilingual Stats
There are many studies showing a range of how many people are bilingual, someone who can speak two languages fluently, and though world statistics are not kept it is estimated that 43% of the world’s population is bilingual.
Several countries around the world have more than one official language, which is why the number of polyglots, or people who speak more than one language, is so high. At the other end of the spectrum, you have the United States and Mexico, neither of whom have an official language, though they each have their own popular language.
Over 41 million Americans, which is approximately 13% of the population of the United States, speaks Spanish, making it by far the second spoken language in the country, behind Engish. Though exact numbers are hard to determine as the number of students learning the language rises, and there are no statistics for undocumented Spanish speakers within the country.
Spanish Language
Spanish, or Castilian, is the world’s second most spoken language, behind Mandarin Chinese. There are ten main dialects of the Spanish language, and most are named after a region in which the native speakers come from.
Spanish is an official language in eight countries, and one territory, throughout the globe. Over 8% of the European Union population speak it natively, with another 7% of the E.U. population learning it as an additional language, on top of their native language.
As with most languages, Spanish came about by evolving from another language, in this case, it was Vulgar Latin around 210 B.C. The first written documentation that has been found to use the precursor to today’s Spanish was found to be from the 9th century.
I’m not exactly sure which dialect of Spanish that Simon Cowell is learning, but I’m sure whichever one it is, it will help him somewhat with the other dialects he comes across as well.